TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

Henri de TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (1864-1901) and Emile MULLER: Yvette Guilbert. Ceramic plate enamelled polychrome, monogrammed in top on the right "TL" and annotated "Small monster! but you made a horror - Yvette Guilbert" in bottom on the left. Bears on the back the stamp "Ivry - Emile Muller Paris Reproduction prohibited" - 51 x 28.5 cm. Despite the success of Toulouse-Lautrec's two albums of lithographs, La Suite française (1894) and La Suite anglaise (1898), the relationship between the artist and his model was no less tumultuous, as the latter found her friend's productions too caricatured. The two never stopped joking and mocking each other. When the singer expressed the wish to receive a ceramic plate decorated with his hand to decorate the top of a coffee table, he brought her some time later a caricature of herself, on which she wrote: "Little monster! But you have made a horror! Yvette Guilbert. "Lautrec entrusted the drawing to the ceramist Émile Muller, in Ivry, and commissioned him to reproduce it, including the signature, on a dozen ceramic tiles. The artist hand-colored each of the plates before firing; thus, each copy is unique. Only four plates are known today outside of museum collections. In 1890, the singer Yvette Guilbert became a muse for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Her slender figure with black-gloved hands appears in many of his posters, and the painter contributed greatly to her fame, making her the star of the cafés-concerts of the Paris of the Belle Époque. Notes: note an old accident and restoration in the right corner of the plate altering neither the main subject nor the signature of Yvette Guilbert - see additional photos